Discounted wool isn't such a good bargain after all. Or, the yarn horror story....

Recently, I heard tell of a LYS not far from me. This shop was the stuff of urban legend. A shop that supposedly still existed, but no one had ever actually seen it. At least no one in my knitting group had actually seen it. I decided, in the grand tradition of Indiana Jones, to risk life and limb in the pursuit of the obscure and wonderful. I packed up some llamas and supplies, and hired an indomitable band of Sherpa to serve as my guides and I set off into the tropical jungle to search.

Ok, I got in my van and drove to Ogden with my daughter. She is not very Sherpa-like. She is a bit reminiscent of a llama, though. (She spits when annoyed.) Also the Sherpa live in the Himalayas and don't have llamas. It's my fantasy though, so get off my case. I don't show up in your dreams criticizing your choice of knee socks to wear while naked and giving a presentation on Alexander the Great in your high school history class.

I found it.

It was a dilapidated old house. It was just off a main thoroughfare in town and it even had a huge sign on it. I'm shocked to this day that no one had found it before. I have a theory that the shop can only be found if you are truly looking for it, otherwise it remains hidden. I'm sure Harry Potter had something to do with it.

Inside the house were rooms upon rooms of yarn, stacked to the ceiling in haphazard piles that may or may not stay put if you happened to walk by them too quickly thus stirring up a slight breeze. I'm quite positive that the only thing holding the place up is the vast quantity of yarn shoring up the walls. The deeper you go into this shop you go, the more wonderful and terrifying it gets. They walls of the house seem less stable. The yarn becomes more of a solid entity. Any moment you expect to be attacked by a creepy yarn monster that oozes out from between the stacks and covers you in it's awful mohairiness. Something that looks like this:

I will make you warm and slightly itchy!!!!

If you are especially lucky, the phone in the very back room will ring. It is no regular old phone. It is an old desk phone that when it rings jangles with an approximate volume and jangliness that makes you pretty certain that this was Satan's old desk phone before he upgraded to a Demonphone 3000.

The upshot of this wonderful and horrible place, was that there was a whole ROOM full of sale yarn. 

For those of you that are unaware, the term "Sale Yarn" is a key phrase which will rise hordes of hungry knitters up from wherever they might be to the location from which the words were uttered. Imagine, if you will, being in the midst of the Zombie Apocalypse and yelling "Free Brains!" Yeah, it's like that. Use this phrase with the utmost caution. 

Inside this room I found a very special treasure. Eleven skeins of the softest natural white superwash vintage french wool. Big skeins too. I knew then that this lovely wool was destined to be a sweater for my sweet husband who loves handknits, wearing white, and has a terrible habit of spilling on himself. I took this delicious find home at the bargain price of only $3 a ball.  I was thrilled. 

Hubs had his birthday this last week, so I showed him the delicious yarn and had him pick out a pattern. I started knitting right away so that he would have his sweater ready by his next rotation home which is in November, and certainly time for a nice warm sweater. I was a bit over a foot into the first sleeve when the horror of the yarn store reared it's ugly head once more. 

The yarn was literally falling apart as I knit it. 

I found one hole that had developed where weaknesses in the wool made the yarn break. I unknitted to that spot and then looked carefully over the sleeve where I found at least two more places where the wool would soon self-destruct. After holding back tears, swearing quietly and putting the sleeve back into my knitting basket, I realized that this was the revenge of the yarn shop. Some might say, It was moths! No, I tell you. There is no evidence of bugs in this wool. It is pristine. This, my friends is the revenge of the yarn shop. 

This is what I got for thinking that I could disturb the mohair monster's slumber and take away the shop's life force. Just like any life force, if you take it away from it's entity, it will eventually return to the entity from whence it came. I am certain that this is what is happening. The yarn is returning to the yarn hellmouth store. Eventually, the entire pile of yarn (which I pulled out of my stash and flung onto the floor in anger) will disappear and some other hapless knitter will find it in the sale room of the evil yarn shop and take it home to knit her husband a sweater.

I bet this is exactly how Indiana Jones felt after the whole Lost Ark business.